The boy with the funny name
Harold Walter Krotoschiner was born on October 7, 1939, in Wisbech, a small town in Cambridgeshire to which his mother had been evacuated in the first month of the Second World War. His parents, Heinz and Edith Krotoschiner, were both born in Berlin and had come to Britain as refugees from Nazi Germany. His father was Jewish, from a family whose shop had stood in the main square of the small Silesian town of Bojanowo; his mother was not Jewish. Heinz had run a small business in Berlin printing faces and pictures on toy balloons. He left for the Netherlands in 1937, and Edith followed a few months later.
When war broke out, his father was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, and in 1940 his mother moved with the baby to Bolton in Lancashire. They lived in a poor part of town, on Arkwright Street, and Harry walked to school past the windows of cotton mills. Among classmates called Entwistle and Higginbottom, he remembered, he was the kid with the funny name, and he tried hard to blend in, speaking only English at school. In 1955 his father shortened the family name to Kroto and, with help from friends from before the war, set up a small balloon factory. Harry spent his school holidays there mixing latex dyes, repairing machines and doing the stocktaking, work he later saw as perfect training in practical problem solving.
Meccano, art and chemistry
His parents had lost almost everything, but they did all they could to get him into Bolton School, a school with exceptional teachers; the actor Ian McKellen was in the same year. Kroto loved art, gymnastics and woodwork, played endlessly with his Meccano set, and dreamed of winning Wimbledon. A chemistry teacher who could blow continuously through a gas blowpipe to melt lead, and the smells and bangs of the school laboratory, drew him toward chemistry. Years later he argued that Meccano, a real engineering kit, taught the most important skill anyone can learn: the delicate touch needed to tighten a nut just enough and no more. He also worried that the hands-on, slightly dangerous school chemistry that had hooked him was disappearing from classrooms, and that fewer adventurous young people would choose science as a result.
He went to the University of Sheffield, where he earned a first-class degree in 1961 and a doctorate in 1964 in the spectroscopy of short-lived molecules. He also played for the university tennis team, designed covers and posters for the student magazine and won a national book-jacket design competition. Graphic design, he always said, was his first love. After postdoctoral years at the National Research Council in Ottawa, in the famous spectroscopy laboratory built by Gerhard Herzberg, and at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he joined the University of Sussex in 1967. He gave himself five years to make research work, with a plan to retrain as a graphic designer if it did not.
Carbon chains in space
The early years were lean. Returning from America to a lectureship at Sussex, his salary fell, he recalled, from 14,000 dollars to 1,400 pounds, and Margaret had to find part-time work while expecting their second son. He fought for years to get his own microwave spectrometer from the research council, finally succeeding in 1974. Meanwhile he built lasers and other equipment himself, and with colleagues he made the first molecules containing a double bond between carbon and phosphorus, work he was proud of in its own right.
At Sussex Kroto built instruments to study unusual molecules that are hard to make and quick to fall apart. In the mid-1970s his group made long, thin carbon-chain molecules in the laboratory, measured their radio-wave fingerprints and, with radio astronomers in Canada, detected the same molecules in clouds of gas between the stars. He wondered where such molecules came from and suspected the answer lay in the atmospheres of carbon-rich red giant stars. That question would lead him to Texas. Even if he had done nothing else, he wrote, those contributions would have made him feel successful as a scientist.
A football made of carbon
In 1985 Kroto joined Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at Rice University in Houston, where Smalley’s group had built a machine that blasts materials with a laser to make clusters of atoms. With students James Heath, Sean O’Brien and Yuan Liu, they fired the laser at graphite to imitate the conditions near a carbon star. The results showed something nobody had predicted: an extraordinarily stable molecule made of exactly sixty carbon atoms.
The team realised that the only shape that explained its stability was a hollow cage of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, exactly the pattern of a football. Kroto, who had once looked up the address of the architect Buckminster Fuller, recalled Fuller’s geodesic domes and named the molecule buckminsterfullerene. The world soon called it the buckyball. It was a third form of pure carbon, alongside graphite and diamond, and a completely new family of molecules, the fullerenes. Kroto called it a fundamental paradigm shift in our understanding of carbon and sheet materials. In 1990 Wolfgang Krätschmer, Donald Huffman and their students found a way to make C60 in bulk, and Kroto and his Sussex colleagues set about exploring its chemistry. He always regretted that the students and the scientists who first made C60 in quantity received less recognition than the senior team.
The birth of carbon nanoscience
The buckyball changed how scientists thought about carbon. If carbon atoms could curl into a closed cage, they could also roll into tubes. In 1991 the Japanese scientist Sumio Iijima reported carbon nanotubes, rolled-up sheets of carbon far stronger than steel for their weight, and in 2004 researchers in Manchester isolated graphene, a single flat sheet of carbon atoms. Physics World described the discovery of C60 as an early milestone on the road to these materials, which together form one of the largest areas of nanotechnology.
Today carbon nanotubes and graphene are used or being developed in stronger lightweight composites, battery electrodes, sensors, water filters and electronics. Fullerenes themselves are studied for organic solar cells, superconducting materials and medical uses. In 2010 the American Chemical Society named the discovery of fullerenes a National Historic Chemical Landmark. Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Curl and Smalley for the discovery of fullerenes, and he was knighted the same year.
Free science for everyone
Kroto believed passionately that science should be open to everyone, and he spent much of his fame on giving it away. In 1995, with the BBC producer Patrick Reams, he founded the Vega Science Trust, a charity that made high-quality science films, lectures and interviews with leading scientists. Vega produced more than 280 programmes and streamed them free online until it closed in 2012.
In 2004 he moved to Florida State University, where he founded GEOSET, the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology, an online library of recorded lessons free for teachers, students and the public anywhere in the world. He ran hands-on buckyball workshops in which children built molecular models, and he gave countless talks in schools. He said some of his greatest satisfaction came from conversations with schoolchildren, teachers and lay people fascinated by how nature works. He also served as president of the Royal Society of Chemistry from 2002 to 2004.
Jewish roots and a humanist’s convictions
Kroto’s story was shaped by the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, which drove his father from Berlin and made the family refugees twice over. As a boy he went with his father to shul, singing in a language he did not understand while his friends were at the coffee bar, and on at least one fast day he fasted alongside his father. But he wrote in his Nobel autobiography that he never took religion seriously, and he described himself as a devout atheist. He noted wryly that some would say he was not really Jewish anyway, because his mother was not.
He was a patron of the British Humanist Association, a long-standing supporter of Amnesty International, and an outspoken critic of religious influence on science teaching and politics, which some found abrasive. He wrote that he believed in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality and every person can speak, think and write in freedom and safety.
Family and final years
In 1963 he married Margaret Henrietta Hunter, whom he called Marg; they had two sons, Stephen, born in Ottawa, and David. Kroto received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, its oldest award, and around forty honorary degrees. He never gave up art and designed many posters and covers himself.
He died on April 30, 2016, in Lewes, East Sussex, at the age of 76, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Legacy
Kroto’s discovery revealed a hidden side of the most familiar element in chemistry and helped open the age of nanoscale carbon materials. His other legacy is less visible but just as broad: hundreds of free science films and lessons, and thousands of children who built a buckyball with their own hands. He told young people not to chase prizes but to do what interested them as well as they possibly could, and his life showed what that could lead to.
Sources & further reading
Sir Harold Kroto, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Buckyball pioneer Harold Kroto dies at 76, Physics World · Harry Kroto 1939–2016, Chemistry World · Sir Harold Kroto FRS, Royal Society · Harry Kroto, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.